The matches, as open data
DitchBook publishes its verified company-to-WDID matches — the link between a Colorado mutual ditch or reservoir company and its water structures — as a downloadable dataset, free to reuse. It's the same 643 tier-1 matches behind the directory and the map, in one file instead of one page at a time.
What's in it
One row per matched company: its Secretary of State identity, its DWR structure ID(s), water source, earliest decreed year, county, and — on every row — a citation URL to the underlying state record, so any match can be checked at the source. It's built for researchers, other water-data projects, journalists, and anyone else who wants the raw matches rather than clicking through company pages one at a time. Full methodology, including what disqualifies a match: how DitchBook is built.
What it isn't
- Not a complete list of every Colorado ditch or reservoir company's water rights — only companies matched at the tier-1 standard are included, and matching is deliberately conservative.
- Not a substitute for a title search, a water-rights engineering analysis, or the DWR record itself — it's a compilation of public records, offered so the relationship doesn't have to be rebuilt by hand.
- Not a live feed — it's a dated, versioned snapshot. The registry itself refreshes monthly; this dataset is republished when matches change enough to warrant a new version.
- Companies matched
- 643
- Format
- CSV, one row per company
- License
- CC BY 4.0
- Cite it
- DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21711149 — a permanent identifier for academic citation; resolves to the latest version
- Match table published
- August 20, 2026
- Underlying DWR data pulled
- August 11, 2026 — how current the source records behind each match are, distinct from when the match table itself was last published
Separately verified administrative structures
A second, narrower file contains 6 company links found in DWR's full Administrative Structures census that have no current DWR Net Amount row. Each row has a DWR record, a primary verification source, and a publication note. These are useful physical-asset or operating-system links, but they are deliberately excluded from the tier-1 water-right match totals above.
- Download the administrative-structure links CSV.
- The relationship field states the narrow claim that was verified; it does not imply a current decreed amount.
- The evidence and limitations behind this separate tier are documented on the methods page.
Machine-readable structure records
DitchBook also publishes 1,471 canonical WDID dossiers as JSON, including source links, field-level evidence lanes, company-verification status, reviewed-geometry status, and freshness dates. The District 5 pilot is available as one hashed 487-record NDJSON collection for agents and data workflows.
- Agent integration guide — endpoint contract, evidence rules, and safe-use guidance.
- Structure-record manifest — counts, source date, collection hash, and excluded records.
- Version 1 JSON Schema — strict nested validation for every canonical record.
Corrections
Found a match that doesn't check out? Tell us — corrections ship the same day, and demotions are recorded in the dataset's changelog rather than silently dropped.